Posts Tagged app

Two Tufts Students, Danielle Feerst, A16, and Isabella Slaby, A15, are currently raising funds for their business, AutismSees. They are working to create an iOS app for individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorders. The goal of the app is to help individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorders to improve their social skills, personal presentation skills, and leadership development.

The app has a range of important features, such as using the device’s camera in order to give video feedback to the user. Any text can be imported into the app and visual cues will be embedded to make the user look up at a pair of eyes on the top of the screen, as many individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorders have difficulty with making eye-contact.

The part of their app they are currently raising funds for is “Text to Speech” technology. Basically, software will be embedded in the displayed text in order to detect vocal intonation, mispronunciations and timing of the user’s speech. This feature will help individuals to improve pronunciation, respond to questions on time and build vocabulary.

Watch the video below to see Danielle and Isabella discuss more details about their app and why they believe it can improve many lives:

Taylor Salinardi, N12, has launched Bon’App, an app for Android and iPhone and on a website, that provides simple but necessary nutrition guidance.

It is a health app, that unlike many of the existing apps, goes far beyond just bringing up a nutrition label. Bon’App gives extremely detailed information on every food possible but does so in straightforward and easily understandable language. Furthermore, it allows users to personalize the information they receive based on individual health goals, restrictions and preferences.

The app works by using a strong visual: a battery that depletes as an individual consumes less-healthy items and also changes color from green to yellow to red. For protein and fiber, the battery starts empty and fills up as the individual eats towards the recommended amount of these items.

For more information about Salinardi and her app, check out this Friedman School blog post.

For her capstone project, Amy conceptualized an app that would allow individuals with chronic pain to monitor their better days. She was inspired to create it when she realized that the existing apps only helped individuals to monitor pain levels on bad days. She calls the smartphone app, “Chronic Pain: The Good Day Diary.”

The PREP program is the first and only multidisciplinary postgraduate pain management masters program in the United States. For more information on Amy’s project and on PREP, check out this blog.

It’s been about two weeks since Loren Brichter, E06, launched his first-ever mobile game, Letterpress, and it has already reached the ranks of #14 most popular app and #1 most popular Word Game in App Store charts. Before launching Letterpress, Brichter created the Twitter iPhone app we know and love today before it was officially Twitter’s.

Lisa Gualtieri, Assistant Professor in the Health Communication Program at Tufts School of Medicine, taught an online course on “Mobile Health Design” this summer. The course covered trends in health-related apps for smartphones, as well as techniques for developing, designing, and evaluating new health apps. In the video below, Gualtieri speaks with Samantha Noderer, a Health Communications student who learned a lot of useful information in the course. She particularly enjoyed the group project for the course, which asked students to design a new app for weight loss management.

Foster Lockwood, E13, was just trying to leave his girlfriend a voicemail when the lengthy and cumbersome process to send his message hit him. And what began as a general annoyance, turned into a real life project for the computer science engineer.

In just a few months, Lockwood created Wyre, an app that to him is, “everything texting should be.” After downloading the free app and registering, Wyre users can send each other messages in texts, photos (with captions!), drawings, audio clips, YouTube videos, a map of their location, and contacts all from one easy to use screen.

Without global limitations or caps on the number of members you can have in one text message, Wyre might just be the next big thing in messaging! Check out Lockwood’s creation on Facebook and on the web.

When Amadou Crookes, A15, Nate Tenczar, E15, and Jake Rosenberg, E15, entered Tufts’s first ever Hackathon, they had no idea they would leave the 24-hour intensive programming marathon with the code to smartphone gold.

The three initially entered thinking they’d work on an iPhone game, but after one of their friends from MIT had a difficult time getting to campus and suggested Tufts make an app more like MIT’s, the group decided to work on a Tufts-centered app instead. Together, they decided to create an app from which any Jumbo could easily access many necessities on their mobile device – an often arduous and frustrating task before the launch of their creation, iJumbo.

The group received rave reviews from the two professors and one industry adviser who made up the Hackaton’s panel, and after a summer of re-coding their work on a Mac, iJumbo was released this fall. Complete with news from the Tufts Daily, a campus map, Tufts Dining menus and nutritional information, Joey tracker, TuftsLife events, and Trunk, the app has everything a Jumbo could ask for. It has been rated 11 times in the iPhone App Store, averages a perfect five stars, and is touted by reviewers as being “better than fall ball” and “the most useful app at Tufts.”

Despite their success, the group keeps working to improve the app by adding more features to enhance the iJumbo experience. They’re also working on an Android version, which should be available soon!